Distance Training 2011

The fourth season of Distance Training rides begins Saturday, January 15 in Mountain View. These are challenging rides for intermediate and advanced cyclists, with a focus on increasing distance to and beyond the longest days of AIDS/LifeCycle. For many riders, ALC is as much a mental challenge as it is a physical challenge, and the Distance Training rides are a great opportunity for you to get experience spending long hours in the saddle ... and dealing with all of the issues that come up for you on such long rides.

Here's a quick preview of what I'm planning for this season. As always, the routes and descriptions are subject to change, but this will give you a good idea of what to expect. Distances are approximate. All rides leave from the Caltrain overflow parking lot in downtown Mountain View.

Ride 1: 40 miles, January 15. We'll visit Woodside on routes that will be familiar to anyone who's done the Palo Alto rides this autumn. Nothing overly challenging, but this is a good introduction and gives you the chance to meet other riders.

Ride 2: 45 miles, January 29. To Los Gatos and a little bit beyond, with a significant climb up Kennedy Road and briefly into San Jose before returning on an easier route.

Ride 3: 50 miles, February 5. (Note that there's no week off before this ride! This is to keep our calendar in sync with the major ALC events of the upcoming spring.) This is one of the more devious rides -- 25 miles of nearly flat terrain followed by 25 miles of quite hilly roads. Your challenge is to resist the urge to ride all-out in the first half of the ride so that you'll have sufficient energy for the second half. Many riders are surprised at how easy it is to run afoul of this ... and this is a very necessary skill to get you through the ride in June.

Ride 4: 60 miles, February 19. We'll head up the Peninsula into the Crystal Springs area, but not quite to the dam because of the ongoing closure. We'll climb the Polhemus hill and then enjoy the thrilling descent down Ralston before taking Alameda de las Pulgas all the way back to Menlo Park.

Ride 5: 70 miles, March 5. We'll go out into seemingly the middle of nowhere around Calaveras Reservoir, high in the hills above Milpitas. We'll climb Calaveras in the shorter, steeper direction and then cruise through the hills before returning through Sunol and Niles Canyon and across the Dumbarton Bridge.

Ride 6: 80 miles, March 19. Get ready to climb! We're going to Half Moon Bay via Highway 92, just like the traditional Day 1 route of ALC, and we'll continue down the coast to San Gregorio before turning inland and climbing Highway 84 to Skyline Blvd. Total climbing for the day is about 4,400 feet.

Ride 7: 90 miles, April 2: Get ready to climb again! After taking an easy route into Hayward, we'll climb into the CSU East Bay campus on the notorious route from the Seismic Challenge ride in October, all the way to the top of the Hayward Hills, followed by a steep descent into Dublin Canyon. We'll climb over the Dublin Grade and drop down into San Ramon for a somewhat less stressful ride into Sunol and back through Niles Canyon. One long, steep climb, but only about 3,000 feet total for the day.

Ride 8: 100 miles, April 16. For our first century ride of the season (and quite possibly your first century ever?), we'll make a giant loop around the South Bay. We'll visit Los Altos Hills, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Newark, Fremont, Milpitas, San Jose, Los Gatos, Saratoga, Cupertino, and Sunnyvale. One significant climb: Silver Creek Valley Road in south San Jose, and our reward will be quite possibly one of the most exciting urban descents in the Bay Area.

Ride 9: 110 miles, April 30. We'll do another favorite of Distance Training riders -- a ride all the way to Gilroy and back. We get there by going along the Calero and Uvas reservoirs, and we return on the east side of Highway 101 to Morgan Hill before taking Monterey Highway back to San Jose. Although the second half of the ride is almost flat, strong headwinds are possible, making this ride more challenging than it looks. (Then again, in 2010, the headwinds were almost nonexistent.)

Ride 10: 125 miles, May 14. This is it ... the Fourth Annual Altamont Pass Double Metric. Now part of ALC legend (the longest one-day training ride on the nationwide ALC calendar), this ride has a little bit of everything: scenic backcountry, suburban sprawl, and busy city streets. About the only thing it doesn't have is any extremely steep climbs; total climbing for the day is only about 2,600 feet, so the ride is more a test of your endurance than of your climbing strength. Weather can be the biggest challenge on this ride; in the past, temperatures have exceeded 100 degrees along parts of the route. But in 2010, riders were lucky to have an unusually cool day in the 60s, so anything can happen. We have outstanding volunteer support on this ride, including well-stocked SAG vehicles and a group of dedicated roadies who are committed to helping you conquer this challenge.

Rides 1 and 2 run at an official pace of 10-12 mph. Beginning with Ride 3, the pace increases to 12-15 mph. Faster riders are always welcome, but be sure you know how to read a route sheet so you can navigate on your own.

You can't sign up for these rides quite yet, but save the dates. When RSVPs are open, the rides will be posted both here and in the official ALC training ride calendar.

I look forward to riding with you on the 2011 Distance Training rides.

Photo: Riders descend Altamont Pass almost halfway into the 2010 Altamont Pass Double Metric.

Return to Death Valley

I'm still here; I merely sent this blog on vacation for the past month or so while I get mentally ready for the upcoming season of AIDS/LifeCycle 10 training rides. I've still been riding; in fact, I recently passed 6,000 miles for the year so far and am likely headed toward my second-highest annual mileage ever.

In the meantime, however, I've just signed up to ride the Death Valley Century on February 26. This will be my second time on this ride, but the first was way, way, WAY back in 2004 ... long before I was part of the ALC family, and about 35,000 miles ago in my training. While most of this route of the Death Valley Century is relatively easy (there's another route in the fall that is significantly more challenging), I found the ride quite difficult six years ago, and I'm curious to see if my perception of the route will change -- especially the strenuous climb to Jubilee Pass (pictured, 2004), since the climb actually starts well below sea level.

Stay tuned to this blog; as of this Saturday, I will be certified as a training ride leader for ALC10, which means that I'll soon be offering rides out of Mountain View, including the fourth year of the ever-so-popular Cat-3 Distance Training rides, culminating in the Fourth Annual Altamont Pass Double Metric in mid-May. (The Death Valley ride means that I might have to miss one of my own training rides this season, but I'll have a highly qualified team of ride leaders to back me up and fill in.)

If you're an intermediate or advanced cyclist who's part of ALC for the first year or the 10th, I invite you to join us in Mountain View every other Saturday starting in early January. We'll start with a 40-mile ride and gradually work our way up to the double metric with rides that are exquisitely planned and mapped and usually with outstanding support by our volunteer crew of SAG drivers and friends. You'll get an excellent preview of what days on the ride in June will be like, and you'll get to see parts of the Bay Area that you might have never seen before.

Before that, I'll probably run a couple of warm-up rides in December; details on those are coming soon as well.

Hills with (almost) pleasure

Today's 50-mile ride took me someplace I'd never been on a bicycle: to the summit of Sierra Road just outside San Jose, about 2,030 feet high above Silicon Valley. I took the "easier" route to the top up the backside, unlike the Tour of California cyclists who climb the massively brutal Sierra Road directly to the top on a steady 3-mile grade of more than 10%. But "easier" is all relative here; I still had to gain all that elevation in just a few miles, and once up there, a series of rolling hills kept me on my toes.

It was difficult ... and even mildly painful at times. But I didn't end up in a foul mood, like I do on so many other hilly rides. Why not? I didn't do any special nutrition tricks today; moreover, the ride wasn't really long enough to cause issues -- I reached the summit only about 27 miles into my day. The temperature was warm to slightly hot in places; much of the climb was exposed to the autumn sun. And the hills were sufficiently steep that I had to take several breaks just to keep my pounding heart under control. (Who knew ... mine can still thump at 183 bpm!)

But there was an important difference today. I was by myself.

This isn't about being antisocial. But many of us are inherently competitive, and this spirit can easily manifest itself even on a recreational or group ride. With nobody in front of or behind me, I could climb at my own pace, stop when I wanted, and not worry about what anyone else would see or think. In fact, early in the ride before the climbing began in earnest, another cyclist passed me on Tasman Drive, and I instinctively sped up to keep pace with him until it was clear that he was far faster.

On my entire climb up Calaveras and Felter roads today (and back down Sierra), not a single cyclist passed me, nor did I pass any other cyclists, a total distance of about 12 miles -- perhaps a positive side effect of my relatively late 10 a.m. start from Mountain View. (Several were traveling in the opposite direction, so I wasn't out there all alone.)

In my years with AIDS/LifeCycle, I seem to have developed a reputation as a "fast" rider -- a reputation I can sometimes uphold on flat to gently rolling terrain. But when the hills get steep, it's another story, and more than once I've burned myself out trying to maintain a pace that just isn't right for me. The time limits on the ride and during many training rides -- sunset, if nothing else -- impose a deadline on me, and my style when given a deadline is usually to be ahead of deadline as much as possible. (Oh, those years in the newspaper business.)

But unless you're on a timed ride where the deadlines are near the limits of your performance, there's often little need to stress out over them. And, just as important, there's no need to stress out over what others think of your pace or abilities. (It's also a lot easier to say this than it is to practice this.)

Whenever possible, try to make every ride your own.

Photo: Sierra Road winding through the hills, about 2,000 feet above San Jose (in the haze at the bottom).

Help, I'm turning into a cyclist

Today's 80-mile ride from Daly City BART to Pleasanton BART was an experiment for me. I knew going into the ride that the route contained several hills for about 3,850 feet of climbing, including a particularly nasty climb that I'd never done before. (I knew this because today was Day 1 of Seismic Challenge 3.0 and, while I didn't officially do the ride or the whole 105-mile route today due to logistics, I did make the route sheet for them.)

Regular readers of this blog might recall that hills -- especially steep ones -- often put me in a mood most foul and leave me hating the world, the ride, and myself, often all at the same time. Since I started tracking my calorie expenditures about a month ago, I've come to the conclusion that I've been taking in far too few calories for the distance and pace that I usually ride. So I started experimenting with some high-calorie powdered mixes, and I used one today, apparently to great advantage, since even the toughest climb I'd done in a long time didn't ruin my day.

If my heart rate monitor is to be believed, I burned 7,781 calories on today's ride, counting the off-the-bike time I spent at rest stops. In return, I took in about 2,150 calories, about 1,250 of which were in liquid form -- a bottle of Odwalla strawberry-banana juice, plus three water bottles mixed with Perpetuem. The most substantial actual food I ate during the whole ride was a solitary blueberry bagel, although I had a good breakfast before riding and a big sandwich (with, shhhh, curly fries ... don't tell anyone) immediately afterward.

And I think it served me well. The instructions for Perpetuem warn that mixtures can go bad after a few hours, so there's a strong motivation to consume the liquid regularly, which I did -- at the rate of about one bottle (300 calories, in the proportions that I used) for every two hours on the bike. At the end of my 80 miles, I was riding strong, and I don't think it was entirely due to the moderate tailwind that was pushing me into Pleasanton.

Perhaps I could get the same effect by eating more actual food while riding, but attempts to do so in the past have often left me with an upset stomach and reaching for the Pepto-Bismol. I took in about 350 calories per hour of riding, which might be just a wee bit low for my weight but probably a lot closer than I've come in the past.

This merits continued investigation, since anything that keeps me happy on difficult rides is probably good for my cycling psyche!

And a final postscript: Giant, big thanks to everyone in the Seismic Challenge family who welcomed me into their "home" today. As a non-fundraising faux rider, just the route sheet creator, I didn't want to interlope into the big day for everyone else -- the riders who by all measures did an awesome job of fundraising, the roadies who made this difficult route a success for everyone, and the foundation staff who brought it all together. You're the real heroes of the day and the weekend.

Photo: Climbing Hayward Ave. (center foreground), looking west toward the San Mateo Bridge.

Cycle computers and human factors engineering

My two-year-old $49 cycle computer finally bit the dust for good this week -- not just a dead battery (at either end); the transmitter just stopped transmitting to the receiver. When I went to buy a replacement, the selection at my local shop had gone down considerably; I guess the cool kids mostly buy GPS-equipped powerhouses that have more computing power than ran my entire college way back when. I, on the other hand, stuck with the lower-tech solution, and I bought the most expensive cycle computer on offer: the Cateye CC-MC100W Micro Wireless, store price $50.

It does everything you'd expect a cycle computer to do, and the tiny night light would be a nice addition if I ever do more long randonneuring events. But there is, for me, a huge design flaw that left me shouting choice obscenities at the sky during today's ride.

On the CC-MC100W, two buttons are easily accessible to the user while riding. The top button cycles among the various display modes in the small digits (distance, odometer, pace, time, max speed, and so on). The lower button, on the front of the device, turns the computer on or off if auto-on isn't set.

So today, while I'm riding, I want to check my pace for the day so far. With my gloved right hand, I grab the cycle computer and start to press the top button to cycle through the displays. And everything suddenly goes back to zero! I lost my stats on my first 29 miles of riding today.

Why? Pressing both buttons simultaneously -- even for an instant -- is the "reset" command. Did anyone bother to think that a cyclist might naturally grab the front of the computer? Perhaps it's not such a big deal when wearing fingerless cycling gloves, but that really shouldn't be a requirement. And why does the reset happen almost immediately? On my last computer (manufactured by Sigma), the reset sequence took at least five seconds of constant pressure on two buttons, both at the top of the unit and almost impossible to do, accidentally or otherwise, while riding.

Rarely do I see a design flaw this bad in higher-end cycling products. If I hadn't already attached the unit to my bicycle and clipped the twist ties, I'd return it -- but I also don't want to spend another $50 on yet another computer.

Sorry, Cateye, I think you blew it on this one.

Update: Today, on my second ride with the new computer, it registered a maximum speed of 56.3 mph, thanks to interference from some unknown source. With my previous Sigma, in more than 13,000 miles of cycling, never once did interference cause erroneous data. (The worst that ever happened is that the receiver would stop processing for a few seconds, especially near the ferry terminal in Tiburon, but it would catch back up quickly when the link to the transmitter was re-established.) Another black mark for the Cateye.

Building a better route sheet

Again this year, I was honored to be asked by the Seismic Challenge staff to create the route sheets for this year's ride, a 206-mile, two-day route from San Francisco to Livermore to Yountville on Oct. 2-3.

The Seismic Challenge route changes somewhat every year. This time around, part of the route was on streets and highways that I'd never seen, let alone cycled. So although I got a detailed turn-by-turn list from the ride organizers, I realized that I couldn't do a truly effective job of creating a useful route sheet unless I saw the route myself. With that in mind, I packed up the car and headed up to American Canyon for a 40-mile ride to and through Napa and back.

Before leaving, I made a first draft of the route sheet and brought it with me. I carried a red pen in my jersey pocket, and as you can see, I made frequent use of it during the ride. (It's darned near impossible to write neatly with a gloved hand while stopped by the side of the road and using a flimsy map holder as support!) Many of the cautions that we teach in ride leader school were on display:

-- Street signs often are missing, or they don't agree with Google Maps. In Napa, I was particularly surprised at how many street signs were missing within the city limits, as opposed to out in rural nowheresville. Because the Seismic route is marked with route arrows, unsigned streets aren't overly problematic, but if you're making a route sheet for an unmarked route, you need to provide enough visual cues to direct riders through unsigned turns (for example: "first stop sign").

-- Turns that appear to be hard rights or lefts on maps can sometimes be gentle bends, or the other way around. When a cyclist approaches a Y-style intersection, a route sheet says to go "right" is more confusing than one that says to "bear right."

-- Cue sheets automatically generated by some mapping tools, most notably Map My Ride, are notorious for inserting phantom turns that allegedly travel a very short distance before continuing in the desired direction. Other mapping anomalies that can pop up include weird loop-de-loop routings that try to deposit you on the wrong side of a divided highway.

-- Driving a route sometimes yields less satisfactory results than actually riding it. At one entrance to a bike path, there was no curb cut to allow cyclists to ride directly onto the path, forcing a dismount after an especially tricky left turn from a high-speed divided highway. This is the type of thing that cyclists should know about in advance.

-- Another thing that test drivers might not notice as much as test riders is the road condition, especially potholes, bumps, ruts and other obstructions that might affect the side of the road more than the main vehicle lanes. Particularly on descents and other technical parts of a route, it's helpful to warn riders of substandard road conditions.

Many other route sheet designers, particularly in the randonneuring world, include incremental distances on each step of the route sheet. (For example, "At mile 29.0, turn right on Main; continue for 1.5 miles," phrased in a tabular format, of course.) Seismic and ALC don't do this, and that's why you don't see that style here. Incremental distances can be helpful for cyclists whose cycle computers or GPS units don't synchronize exactly with the printed distances, or who detour from the official route and later rejoin it.

One small problem about test-riding a one-way route such as Seismic: Unless you coordinate multiple vehicles and multiple riders, there's often no easy way to get back to your starting point. I solved this by only riding 24 miles of the route in Napa; I was able to chop my return down to only 16 miles by taking a more direct (and stressful) route that certainly wouldn't be appropriate for a large group ride. So, unfortunately, I didn't get to see the very end of the route in Yountville, but a combination of the helpful, detailed instructions from the organizers and careful reading of Google Maps and Street View, and I hope that I've covered all of the main points.

The test will come in early October when this year's intrepid group of Seismic riders sets out on their journey to raise much-needed funds for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. Here's to all of them; one of these years (2011?), I might join you officially.

Ride to eat to ride to eat

Two years ago, I bought a heart-rate monitor on closeout from Woot. (And from that link, I see that they later offered it for even $5 less than I paid for it. Sigh.) Because I found it too awkward and complicated to use while in motion, it went into the random-crap drawer shortly thereafter. But I brought it out of cold storage today because I tackled a new challenge for me: climbing Eureka Canyon Road (pictured) from Corralitos in coastal Santa Cruz County. This 41-mile route had about 4,100 feet of climbing ... or about an even 100 on my difficulty scale, about as challenging a ride per mile as I ever attempt.

I've recently been curious about how many calories I really burn while riding. I've typically used the ballpark figure of 60 calories per mile (humans of lesser bulk than I will consume far fewer), but I figured this ride would test that limit. And based on the numbers, it certainly did.

Given my age, gender, and weight, this HRM claimed that I burned a whopping 3,687 calories on this ride, or just about 90 calories per mile. And that's an average, which includes the corresponding 4,100 feet of descending as well. Of the total calories, only about 600 were burned on the descent from the summit back into Soquel, mostly due to a couple of annoying little hills on the way back down.

How does that compare to online calorie calculators? I get anywhere from about 2,800 to 3,300 calories from the various websites. These, however, base their calculations only on speed and not difficulty of terrain. So even though my reported number seems a little high, I'm somewhat confident that it's a reasonable number given the nasty climbing.

But this raises all sorts of nutrition issues. Replacing 3,687 calories while riding, or even soon thereafter, just isn't practical or healthy. Before the ride, I had a bagel; while riding, I had another bagel, a bottle of electrolyte drink, a bottle of Odwalla, and a bag of Sport Beans -- for a total of about 1,000 to 1,100 calories.

Now for those of us trying to lose weight (and that includes me), this sounds like a good thing indeed -- a 2,500-calorie deficit is about seven-tenths of a pound right there, just on one ride! (Recall that 3,500 calories equals one pound.) But my experience has been otherwise.

It's hardly a secret that, during the five years I've done AIDS/LifeCycle, I've not lost any weight. In fact, I've gained 30 pounds. (That would be 40 pounds, except that I've managed to lose 10 this year somehow.) And while it would be nice to pretend that all the weight is in leg muscles, that wouldn't fool anybody. For all of the good things that have happened to me through ALC, this is my biggest disappointment, especially since I wasn't exactly svelte in 2005 to begin with.

And while my off-the-bike food habits aren't the best in the world, it's not like I'm eating too much. In fact, I've suspected for quite some time that I often eat too little, sending my body into a starvation response that hangs on to every last globule of fat as if it were golden. According to The Cyclist's Food Guide (2005), I currently need 2,860 calories a day just to break even on a no-cycling day. That's a lot of Subway foot-longs. Add another 3,687 calories from a ride of just 3.5 hours, and we're getting into a third trip through the buffet line. And something like my recently-completed 300-kilometer ride might have consumed as many as 12,000 additional calories (and, for me, perhaps even more) in just one day! That is more than 35 Lean Cuisine barbecue chicken microwave pizzas!

But then the math gets slightly more complicated. The daily baseline -- 2,860 calories for me -- allegedly doesn't include cycling. But in the 300k, I was riding for more than 17 hours, or the better part of a day. Do the cycling calories add to the baseline, even though I basically did nothing but cycle for the whole day? Or do I need to reduce the baseline to reflect just the seven hours that I wasn't on the bike? I've tried to find places online where nutritionists talk about things like this, but I've come up empty. It's a big deal, too -- because an extra 2,000 calories or so per cycling day can certainly add up to extra pounds in no time at all.

Randonneurs and other very-long-distance cyclists need to develop a nutrition strategy that works for them, and everyone seems to have their own. I found this long discussion at the New Jersey Randonneurs website in which several riders share their secrets. On AIDS/LifeCycle, we're fortunate that our meals are prepared specifically to meet our extreme caloric and nutritional needs, but even there, it's important to find something that works and then stick with it -- experimenting while on the ride in June merely invites stomach distress.

I keep experimenting. Some things that I've found to work well for me: Odwalla strawberry-banana smoothies (or the fresh-made version from Starbucks), bagels, a Subway meatball sandwich, and the occasional deli-style turkey sandwich. Spicy foods don't do it for me -- no burritos or kung pao chicken while riding. I've never experimented with the "athlete's" high-calorie liquid meals (such as Spiz); perhaps it's just another part of refusing to declare myself a "serious" cyclist. Post-ride pizza and pasta seem to work well (much love for Mi Amore in Lompoc), but never in the middle of a riding day.

All that said, however, I'm obviously still not there, or else I wouldn't still be packing these 30 extra pounds that make me sad. I suspect a sports nutritionist could have a field day with me, but the cost for those I've seen is beyond my budget (particularly in this uncertain economy) ... and I'd probably be an ornery and difficult customer anyway! I've attended the ALC nutrition workshops, and I have all the books here as well (and I've actually read them), so I have the basic tools and knowledge. It just hasn't worked for me.

In a future post: How these nutritional considerations tie into one's mood while riding. If you've seen me get grumpy on the streets of Santa Cruz (as I was yet again at the end of today's ride), you'll know what I'm talking about.